Abstract

The use of Free and Open Source Software (abbreviated as FOSS) has become ubiquitous in many fields, from the Department of Defense to business. The FOSS are “programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program, and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program -without having to pay royalties to previous developers” (Wheeler, 2007, ¶ 2). In education, FOSS is also gaining a foothold with quality programs such as Moodle, Sakai, Ning and Mozilla Firefox. However, there are some challenges and issues in the adoption of these programs for education. This paper addresses those issues for potential users.

Citation

Ozkan, B. (2008). How to effectively use free and open source software in education. In C. Bonk, M. Lee & T. Reynolds (Eds.), Proceedings of E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2008 (pp. 1171-1175). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).